The current in the river of fans was moving against us, and we didn’t want to pull our badges and set off a panic. It was slow getting through, but we finally reached the left side of the stage and entered into a flow of people moving in the direction I had seen her.
“There she is,” Mahoney said.
I stopped to see him pointing at a woman about thirty yards away, also dressed as Celes Chere. But she had thirty pounds on the woman I’d just seen.
“Not her,” I said, catching sight of another Celes Chere, but she was too tall. In frustration I looked at Stapleton, who’d followed us. “Can we get up on the stage?”
He hesitated, and then nodded. “You’re sure it was her?”
“Not one hundred percent, no,” I said, climbing the stairs.
On the stage, I pivoted to scan the crowds on the north side of rings one and two. Mahoney climbed up beside me.
I spotted a third Celes Chere with her back to us, and then two more, and then six or seven others just entering the venue in a pack.
“They’re everywhere!” Mahoney said.
“We’ll have to check every one.”
A voice behind us said, “Who are these guys, Phil?”
Mahoney and I turned to find the founders of Victorious looking at us. We pulled out our credentials and introduced ourselves. They were alarmed when Stapleton said we were searching for an assassin and bomber.
“In here?” said Bronson, the one who’d left Harvard. “Why would he come here?”
“She,” Mahoney said. “And we don’t know. Maybe she’s a fan of your games.”
I said, “She was wearing a contestant’s badge.”
Crowley, the one who’d dropped out of MIT, had a mild stammer. “What d-does she look like?”
“She’s dressed as Celes Chere.”
Bronson laughed. “Good luck finding her. There’ll be two hundred of them in here by the time we get to the semifinals.”
Crowley studied me. “Do we need to clear this hall? Sweep the place?”
“We can’t do that,” Bronson said. “We’re not doing that. It’s all we’d need to—”
Over the crowd noise, the first explosion was muffled. The second was louder but nothing like the bomb that had torn apart the motel room the day before.
Still, gray and brown smoke boiled and billowed from the northeast corner of the space. People there began to scream and run toward the exits.
That set off a stampede. The smoke rolled forward and swallowed the crowd, which turned hysterical. Fire alarms went off. The sprinkler system was triggered.
That set off more hysteria, and people began to slip and fall as they scrambled toward the doors.
Stapleton grabbed Bronson and Crowley. “Until we know what’s going on, we need to get you both out of here, now!”
The video-game creators looked frightened but nodded.
Bronson said, “You don’t think this assassin woman did this, do you?”
Peering through the mist and the smoke at the knots of fans fleeing the building, I said, “There’s not a bit of doubt in my mind she did it. The question is why.”